Mario Vargas Llosa: “Peruvians should vote for Keiko Fujimori, because he represents the lesser evil”

The Peruvian Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, omnipresent in Peruvian politics for the last three decades to support or demolish candidates, had been the big absentee of the electoral campaign of his country … newspaper the Chronicle, entitled “Peering into the abyss”, condemned: “Peruvians should vote for Keiko Fujimori, because he represents the lesser evil.”

For Vargas Llosa, the first round victory of “provincial professor” Pedro Castillo came as a surprise and he warned that if he succeeded in the June 6 ballot, his government would lead to a military coup and a carbon copy. of the Chavist regime.

The writer assures that Castillo follows the ideas inspired by “his two teachers”, the Bolivian Evo Morales and the Ecuadorian Rafael Correa, who, he recalls, “cannot set foot in his country because he would go to prison, where he was convicted of crimes committed during his presidential term”. He also points out that Morales was quick to congratulate Castillo and that there are rumors that he has financially supported his candidacy.

“If he wins the second electoral round, Pedro Castillo intends to establish a popular economy with markets, inspired, precisely, by the model of Bolivia and Ecuador (which now, with the presidential victory of Guillermo Lasso, will radically change ). The state contracts will be renegotiated because, in Castillo’s opinion, “transnational corporations currently keep 70% of the profits and the state only 30%” ”. And he continues: “This means that the state ‘privatizing and exporting capital will change and now become a nationalizing sovereign state that strengthens the internal economy by investing its capital in the country.’ Companies that do not accept this approach will be nationalized, along with major mining, gas, oil and energy centers., since Castillo wants to put an end to national mining, which he considers incompatible with a policy of genuine defense of nature and a social policy of progress ”.

Although Castillo did not abrogate the Constitution, he made sure that all international treaties were revised, “so that in the future there is not in Peru the unfair disproportion which” makes an employer win. twenty times what a worker earns “.

“It would not take much more to indicate that Pedro Castillo’s Peru will integrate the countries which, following the Mexican government, want to resurrect the Puebla group and break with the group called Lima. In other words, it will go back to that inaugurated by Commander Chávez in Venezuela, the socialism of the 21st century, which forced more than five million Venezuelans to emigrate to neighboring countries so as not to die of hunger, ”explains Vargas Llosa. .

For the writer, the society that Pedro Castillo will create, “will have all the characteristics of a communist society, at a time when – the Peruvians who voted for him do not seem to have realized it yet – communism has disappeared from the planet, with the most terrifying exceptions, namely Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and North Korea “.

And he warns: “I am absolutely convinced that if Castillo, with similar ideas, manages to take power in the second round of elections, in a few months there will be no more proper elections in Peru, where, in the future, it will be a parody, like those that Nicolás Maduro organizes from time to time in Venezuela to justify his unpopular regime ”.

Vargas Llosa explains that a Castillo government will likely lead to a military coup in the short term in Peru: “Right-wing soldiers, or leftists in the ‘Velasquista’ way, which, as has always happened in our history, will make the country retreat in a barbaric way and will impoverish it much more than it is not. “

“Wanting to put an end to mining, which is the wealth of the Peruvian Andes, is unprecedented recklessness, the daughter of sheer ignorance, which would stifle one of the fundamental sources of national development,” he wrote with indignation.

In addition, recalls that in the social field, Castillo is extreme right: “He is against same-sex marriages, sex education at school and abortion, an area in which it fully coincides with the Catholic Church which has recently waged a battle against attempts by the most progressive left and center to stand up for women and the right of homosexuals to be considered normal and equal to heterosexuals, what I have always supported ”.

After listing the dangers that, in his opinion, Castillo poses, The Nobel Prize for Literature explains that this “abyss” that he describes has Keiko Fujimori as an adversary, “Who until now has defended her father, the former dictator, from whom she was temporarily separated, but no longer, as she promised to forgive him if he came to power.” And remember that “She also participated in a very direct way, benefiting from the dictatorship, and is accused by the courts of having profited from Operation Lava Jato, from which she would have received money, for which the judiciary asked her for thirty years in prison ”.

Vargas Llosa’s position is surprising as he consistently fought Fujimori. In fact, in 1990 the writer founded the Freedom Movement and ran for the presidency of Peru, which he lost in the second round to him.

However, he declares: “I believe that in the next elections – those of the second round – Peruvians should vote for Keiko Fujimori, because she represents the lesser evil and there are, with her in power, more possibilities to save our country. democracy, while with Pedro Castillo I do not see any ”.

But the writer assures us that your support has conditions. For him, Keiko must commit, in the name of these public freedoms that he now claims to defend, “to respect freedom of expression., not to forgive Vladimiro Montesinos, responsible for the worst crimes and thefts of the dictatorship, not to expel or change the judges and prosecutors of the judiciary, who in recent times have had such a gallant attitude in defense of democracy and human rights, and, above all, to call elections at the end of their mandate, in five years ”.

If he adapts to these obligations, he reaffirms, Keiko Fujimori has the “unique” opportunity to seize power through fair elections and to have a broad social and popular base to carry them out. necessary reforms that will make Peru a country. Fair, free and modern and give it back the leadership it once had in Latin America.

In search of arguments as to why his country has found itself so close to this “abyss”, Vargas Llosa lists the pandemic and the great inequalities in Peru, but warns: “The right to vote is not enough, if Peruvians are wrong and vote badly. They already did in the first round. It is important that they do not reproduce the error ”.

Álvaro Vargas Llosa, son of the Nobel Prize winner, revealed that the candidate had read the column and made contact. “After thanking him for his support, Keiko Fujimori expressed his total agreement with the democratic guarantees that my father asks of him in his article,” he said on his Twitter account.

“I thank and welcome the support of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa because at the moment we are not only facing the pandemic and hunger, but we are also facing communism,” the candidate said this afternoon. by Fuerza Popular. in a public document. “I thanked him for his support and, as I have done for many years in my political career, I reminded him of my absolute commitment to democracy, freedom of expression and the independence of powers. “, he added.

The author’s column on Conversation in the Cathedral it came after a prolonged silence that lasted throughout the election campaign. In tune with the general apathy that reigned during the weeks leading up to the elections, the writer, who currently resides in Spain, had anticipated that the time would have come to make a statement … And with this column, he clarifies his position .

Is that Since the 90s, his opinion has been the key to directing the vote towards a candidate or to burying the aspirations of those with whom he did not sympathize, even when in 1990 an unknown Alberto Fujimori unexpectedly beat him at the polls while he was the favorite.

The last time the author of The city and the dogs campaigned in 2016, when he called to vote for Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker who had an opaque government and resigned in March 2018 punctuated by the corruption scandal of Brazilian construction company Odebrecht. “It would be a disaster for Peru if Keiko Fujimori was elected. It would be the justification for a dictatorship, ”he said of the banker’s rival in the 2016 poll.

He had already recommended in 2011 to vote for Ollanta Humala, a former soldier supported by the Brazilian president of the left Lula and a former ally of Hugo Chávez because his rival in the second round was also Keiko. “This will not happen, I refuse to believe that my compatriots will be so stupid to put us in the dilemma of choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer, which would be Humala and Keiko,” he had previously told them. subject.

In 2006, he urged to vote for Alan García, “the lesser evil”, who had been one of his biggest political opponents in the 1980s, to avoid Humala’s victory. “I said you had to vote for him, even if it made you feel bad,” he said years later.

The election campaign has only just begun. Pedro Castillo, of Peru Libre, and Keiko Fujimori, of Fuerza Popular, will meet on June 6.

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